Wed May 20, 2020 4:19 pm
Hmmm - do you not have your own copies of the files you have up? From what I've seen over the last decade or two, not just with PBase, it is risky to assume these gallery display sites can be relied on as archival storage. A number of them have just disappeared with no or very little notice.
It would be an exercise to try ones patience, but assuming I was working from my Windows desktop, I would first set up an empty directory tree to match my PBase gallery directory tree. Then I would arrange two onscreen windows, one of my browser and one of the file directory. I would then select one of my PBase galleries, select an image, and set the size to 'Original'. As far as I know, once done, all further image views would then show up at original size. I would then systematically walk through the online and local directory trees and transfer the image file to my computer by left clicking on the PBase image and dragging it to the equivalent location on my desktop directory tree. (I know this works in Windows; I would guess, but with no first hand experience, there is an Apple equivalent.)
By working from the original size, you would get the highest resolution available, and also the filename will include the original name you supplied, albeit prefixed by some cryptic PBase indexing. So while not a trivial exercise, it is a way to get there.
Long ago (probably after some major PBase crash), I started maintaining such a directory on my local system and then uploading from that to my PBase galleries so that I could restore more or less from scratch if I had to, or upload it to some other gallery site. I later began a series of HTML files on my system that displays the images as thumbnails in the same general presentation as my PBase galleries, and including my caption info in HTML comments for each image. Yes that is tedious, but I could -- in theory -- reconstruct just about everything I have on PBase.
Every now and again the management here surfaces and acknowledges their existence, but in general absentee management appears to be the rule. Occasionally something new happens, the last performance upgrade was mind bogglingly faster. But I would be wary of placing much hope on any explicit new feature happening on any sort of schedule. Over the past half dozen years there have been some script packages more or less user created to download stuff, but there were constant problems with them breaking because of various internal changes in the PBase site. Having proactively maintained my backups, I fear I have not paid much attention to whether anything like that still exists (or works!) I would think supplying an app to potentially facilitate users moving their stuff away from PBase would be far down their priority list.
Perhaps someone else will show up here with more info.